I didn’t answer. My lips were blue and senseless, and I doubted they’d form intelligible words. Not that that really mattered much, talking to Voice.
Having escaped the rockfall, I was now weirdly reluctant to leave it. As soon as I did, I wouldn’t know where I was. Using my unwieldy limbs like wooden paddles, I sloshed though the waist high water over to where I imagined the torch had been extinguished. A couple of dives down and I found it, thoroughly soaked and currently useless.
<‘Adventurers abrasions’!> Voice went on manically. <‘Lucky lacerations’!>
“You call that lucky?” I managed to growl.
I grunted concession to this. Arguing with Voice at least kept the oppressive darkness at bay. I thought of what it felt like, under all the heavy, settling rock.
“How about, ‘ground halfling’?”
Voice seemed to find this particularly hilarious.
“You’re telling me.”
Apprehensive though I was about moving forward, I couldn’t stay here. Finally, I put my back to the rockfall and began walking. Only a couple of steps in, I froze again, with terror rather than cold, as I felt the chilling cut of a tripwire against my ankle.
As my heart rate began to de-escalate, my fear turned to anger, directed at the only tangible target in front of me.
Stupid traps. Ceilings should stay where they belong.
I carefully felt under the water for the wire, and ran my hands along it, ever so gently, tracing the wire back to it’s trigger. The trigger turned out to be a piece of springy metal, bent in half, which would have wedged between the false keystones at the arch of the tunnel. When the spring was removed, the altered stones slid free, and the rest of the loosened dirt in the ceiling followed.
[Skill acquired: Trapsmithing]
I held the trap pieces in my hand, foiled in my ability to prevent the disaster which had already occurred, and finally used my dagger to chop the tripwire into tiny pieces. Not that the goblins wouldn’t find another one, I was sure, but I anything I could do to make their job harder was a win for me. This small vengeance satisfied, I continued on. It was slow going, feeling my way along the walls, creeping forward a step at a time. The darkness spread out around me in all directions, but the tunnel only went one way. I guess at least I can’t get lost.
The water had gone from chest high down to waist high, but still frustrated my movement. I suppose it would have only been knee high to an elf or a human, and for the first time in my life, I envied the tall races their long stilts of legs. They would be able to just march along, lifting their feet completely out of the water at every step, each stride as long as I was tall.
“It’s not like I’m not as fast as any human.” I grumbled to myself, trying to pretend my unease had nothing to do with the stygian blackness. “I mean, I could leap tall elves in a single bound, if I wanted to. I could make hurdles of humans…”
If humans, then why not water?
Experimentally, I pushed off of my heels, and leapt out of the water like a flying fish. I got my arms out in time to deflect my rebound off the ceiling, then splashed back down like a cannonball. Putting my arms above my head, I did it again. The ceiling was too low to make full use of my jumping ability, but if I didn’t fully activate my jump, I didn’t have the momentum to get out of the water. Leap-thump-splash! Leap-thump-splash! Leap-thump-splash!
My progress was about as stealthy as an auto-reloading cannon let loose in an aqueduct, but it was faster than wading. After a while, I paused to rub the bruises out of the heels of my hands. It’s too bad I can’t get more forward momentum out of my jumps. If only I could flip over midair and hit the ceiling with my feet, so the Talarian Sandals could reabsorb the inertia….
[Intelligence check: Success]
The ceiling was too low, but what about the walls? Getting as far to the side of the tunnel as I could, I jumped at an angle, and then bounced diagonally down the passageway, off the next wall, and then the next. Boing! Boing! Boing!
It was terrifying and exhilarating, flying blind through the darkness, abandoning my fate to any further goblin traps or loose stones or sudden walls.
I paused to catch my breath. The exercise had warmed up my muscles, but was taking its toll on my energy level. Ahead of me, there was a faint change in the status of the darkness. My breath stopped as I concentrated on it, hardly daring to hope. Was it a glow, or just phantasms invented by the bored photoreceptors in the back of my eyes? Despite my intense staring, I could confirm nothing.
I turned my face, trying to concentrate without looking at where I thought I saw something. Just like watching sand cats. Never let them know you see them…
Yes! It WAS a glimmer. I almost whimpered with hope. Slowly, I turned my footsteps toward the light.
As I got closer, I saw the glow was coming from an intersecting tunnel, but this one had some kind of round door with a central, wheeled handle. Currently it stood open.
On the other side the passageway wound upwards, with actual steps, out of the muck and into a small, domed room. Lucerna Nanorum, in every color of the spectrum, blossomed on the walls and ceiling, bright and vibrant as the inside of a rainbow. Etched into the far wall between the mushrooms was a looping, three sided symbol, like a triangle with a teardrop on each end. The luminescent blue moss had grown into its deep groves.
I felt it.
“Are they really rare?”
I simply stood for a few minutes, basking in the radiant glow of the dwarven candles, and then went back down to the circular door and shut it, spinning the wheel on the inside until I felt it lock. No goblins were getting in here. I then went back and stripped out of my wet and frigid clothes, hanging them on the mushrooms next to my sopping copy of the sewer map. I kept my daggers close by, making sure to wipe them off as best as possible to avoid rust.
I didn’t want to close my eyes. The dwarven candles were so beautiful, the light so welcome after my ordeal with the cave-in, I was almost afraid that if I blinked it would all disappear. In spite of my best efforts, fatigue and safety drew my eyelids to rest and my soul down into sleep.
I dreamed. I dreamed of a map of goblin tunnels, in three dimensions, growing bigger and bigger and ever more detailed until it overcame me, folding around me like a sheet, and then I was in the map, which was real, and high, shrill laughter chased me down the tunnels. I followed the cries of a trapped dwarf, but I was lost amongst the echoes, and when I called out to him my own voice turned back on me, unrecognizable, and became the mad squeaking of
rabid rats. Beady eyes glinted in the dark, then it was raining darkness and the tunnel collapsed on me, over and over again, trip wires and trapped stones and suffocating weight, falling, falling, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe…
I can’t breathe!
I woke, having somehow wrapped myself up in my silks, my face buried in a fold of cloth. I tore it away, gasping down deep lungfuls of damp, mossy air.
[Achieved Level 3]
[New Class acquired: 1st level Rogue, (Total: Ranger 2, Rogue 1)]
[Granted abilities: Sneak Attack, Trapfinding]
[Granted (1d8) maximum Hit Points: 3]
[Rest bestowed: 5 Hit Points]
[Hit Points: 8/15]
I stretched, examining my bruises by the shadowless glow, picking at the scabs forming on my arms and knees.
I wasn’t sorry. I felt pretty good. All this cushy city living had put some meat on my bones, and even now, half beat up, I felt as hearty as I ever had, half starved out in the desert.
My stomach growled. It was convinced that in fact we were starving, desert or no, and if I didn’t put some proper calories in it right now, it might just implode, sucking itself into some kind of demon infested pocket dimension.
“All right then.” I told it. “Let’s go find some breakfast.”
I dressed, sheathed my daggers, updated my map as best as I could remember, and re-kindled my now dry torch. At the edge of the mushroom glow, I turned back towards the Trine, and gave it some grateful thoughts for a night of safety.
Back in the sewers proper, there was of course only one way to go, since by the level of the water, the cave-in still blocked the direction I had come from. I was less than eager to go wading again in the waist high muck.
I grinned, and jumped for the far wall.
Boing!
I bounced down the tunnel at literally a breakneck pace, barely pausing for thought, my torch guttering blue with the passage of moist air. Boing! Boing!
Past a spot where the walls leaked and grew thick with algae, Boing! Past a change in the stonework, from a slate grey fieldstone to a paler granite, Boing! Past a small pool where the tunnel strangely bulged—
Or I meant to, anyway. I slipped rather than skidded, and went tumbling over into the water. So much for the staying dry plan.
Grumbling, I waded in and fished around the detritus at the bottom, coming up with only a charred piece of dense wood buried in the muck, remarkably light and mysteriously undissolved by the passage of water.
“Well, I hope this is worth it.” I put the charcoal in my pouch, which was full of water. The little piece of scorched wood kept trying to float out.
Now that I was stopped, I hefted up my torch and took a look around the tunnel. Ahead, it looked like there might be a branching. I splashed forward, the water now down to knee level, and sure enough, another tunnel led downward, lit occasionally by moss and dwarven candles.
“How far do these sewers go, anyway?”
“It must have taken them forever to build. I mean, this is a lot of work.”
Tempting though the light was, I turned from the glowing tunnel and continued on into the dark. I figured the most likely places for the goblin sabotage that Hel was looking for would be wherever they had taken out the mushrooms, and anyway, the other passage led downwards, and I was trying to find another way out.
I crept along for hours, getting hungrier, and marking anything strange on my map. It was, by my estimation, about lunchtime, and by my stomach’s estimation about the third week of a famine, when my paranoid scanning of the tunnels paid off. There.
[Perception check: Success]
Strung along this side of a t-shaped intersection was a blackened tripwire. Carefully as if I was sneaking up on a gecko, I approached, crouching down to examine the trap. It was the same design as the one which had collapsed the ceiling on me. I ran my torch along the wire, looking at the design, memorizing the whole thing for visual clues I might use in the future.
I could just step over the tripwire, of course, but that would leave this mess in place for whoever came after me. Someone who might not just happen to have a ring of waterbreathing, who might not be able to wiggle their way free.
I abruptly decided my job description included, by implication, the obligation to make any place I went safer for others who might follow me. I knelt down and pulled out my dagger. There was nothing I could do about the damaged keystones, but without a tripwire they would at least theoretically stay put until the repair crews could come and fix them. The wire was strung taut, and my dagger was not able to saw through it without added pressure that might bring the whole tunnel down on me. After a few minutes of poking around it, I finally pushed the tip of my dagger through the loop securing the far end of the wire, and then used the handle of my torch to lever the eye loop out of the wall.
[Trapsmithing check: Success. -4 circumstance penalty for improvised tools]
I coiled up the wire and created a pinch point to cut at, now that the wire was not dangerously strained. Keeping a wary eye on the uncertain ceiling, I darted over to the far side and looked for tripwire number two. Sure enough, there it was—hanging ominously just above the waterline like a thin tendril of betrayal. I put myself on the far side of it, and used my dagger to do my eye loop trick again. This eye loop was stuck in more firmly than the last one, and I grunted as I tried to maneuver it out. There was a bit more give if I levered it upwards…
[Trapsmithing check: Failed. -4 circumstance penalty for improvised tools]
The eye loop came out all of a sudden, my dagger and my hand jerking upwards as it let loose, and yanking the tripwire out in the process. Above me was the barest warning of a rumble before the tunnel collapsed on...
[Dodge check: Success. +1 class bonus vs traps]
…where I wasn’t, as I shot backwards like a loosed spring. The ceiling fell in a pile of stonework and scree, finishing with a cloud of dirt that rolled along the collapsed mound and over me, safely at the edge of destruction.
Stupid traps.
I sighed and pulled out my much-marked map, stashing my dagger to update yet another cave in. I sure hoped the artificer’s guild had a lot of stonemasons on hand. From ahead of me in the gloom came sound of idiotic giggling. I quickly wedged my torch upright in the rubble, and stepped to the side, into the shadows.
“Eeeheeehehee! Squishy-skins squished!”
“Told you, much easier this way. Dead squishies not fight back.”
“I don’t wanna fight squishy-skins.”
“Dead squishies! Dead squishies!”
Another four goblins hopped into the circle of torchlight. The one in the lead was bigger than the others, and wore a necklace of vertebrae and teeth.
“Put out stupid fire, then we dig up dinner.” he told the others.
“I don’t wanna dig! Digging hard work!”
“You no back talk me! I am Big Boss! I say, you do!”
“Yes, Boss!”
“Whatever you say, Boss!”
“I don’t wanna… ok, Boss!”
I stepped out of the shadows, drawing my daggers. “Oh no you don’t! The fire is mine, and it stays lit.”
All four goblins squeaked in surprise, and the lead goblin recovered first. He hissed at me, and then fired his grey tongue at my hand. I was ready. I let the sticky mass envelope my hand, wrapped it around my wrist for good measure, and then rocked back on my heels and launched away, hauling the astonished goblin forward by his elastic tongue and slingshotting him towards the rock pile. As he flew past, I nimbly turned my body sideways, avoiding collision, and brought my other dagger up underneath and into his stomach. His own momentum gutted him before his body even landed.
[Save the Storm Drains: Quest Update!]
[Slay the goblin ambushers: 1/4]
With a symmetrical flicking motion, I shook the blood and mucus from my daggers, and turned towards the other three goblins.
They looked at me, at their disemboweled leader, at each other, and then, to my great astonishment, threw themselves prone in the muck at my feet.
“Mercy, mighty squishy-skin!”
“I don’t wanna die!”
“All hail new Big Boss!”
“All hail new Boss, same as the… errk!”
The one that begged for mercy seemed to be some kind of first mate to the necklaced leader. He poked the last one in the ribs. “Shuddup, you!” he hissed. “You know what bosses say about ‘smart mouths’!”
“You lot.” I waved at them uncertainly with my dagger. “Why aren’t you fighting me?” These goblins looked fatter and better fed than the scouting party had been.
First Mate pulled just his head out of the muck. “Big Boss say fight her?” he asked, hesitantly.
A Fist Full of Sand: A Book of Cerulea (Sam's Song 1) Page 17